We Now Know If Yellowstone 1883 Will Get A Second Season
Yellowstone 1883 is ultimately not receiving a second season.
Yellowstone and its prequels 1883 and 1923 make up the biggest franchise to hit television since Breaking Bad or The Walking Dead. The franchise, which follows the Dutton family as they defend their ranch in Wyoming, has been breaking records with the Yellowstone Season 5 premiere (which reached almost 16 million views), making it the most-watched show of 2022. Recently, series creator Taylor Sheridan did an interview with Deadline that will finally let us know whether Yellowstone’s first spin-off, 1883, will get a second season. Unfortunately, for fans who were looking forward to more from this chapter of the saga, the answer is no.
We’ve just passed the anniversary of the release date of Yellowstone’s 1883, which premiered on December 19, 2021. Two months after the show’s release, Paramount+ revealed that they were calling for more episodes of 1883 and announced Yellowstone’s second spin-off, 1923, starring Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren. However, after fans saw the 1883 season finale, audiences began to wonder how the studio would be able to pull off a second season and what it could possibly be about.
(Warning: Spoilers for 1883 ahead).
Yellowstone’s 1883 ended in a heartbreaking but satisfying way, with most of the main cast dead. While Yellowstone follows the Dutton family in the modern era as they defend their ranch from big businesses, 1883 showed audiences how the Dutton family came to be in Wyoming in the first place.
The season followed the Dutton family west, placing most of their focus on the family’s daughter, Elsa (Isabel May), who grows from a sheltered child to a grown woman and cowboy capable of defending her family’s wagon from attack. Unfortunately, in the wake of her triumph, Elsa suffers a fatal wound and dies in her father James’ (Tim McGraw) arms in the final episode.
Throughout the season, Sheridan had done a great job convincing viewers that Elsa was an important part of the Yellowstone epic and that killing her off in 1883 would be inconceivable. While killing off the show’s main character is heartbreaking enough, Sheridan went a step further and also killed off any of the remaining cast that a second season could have focused on, making it all the more confusing why Paramount+ would have announced a second season was happening.
As it turns out, Paramount+ was never supposed to announce a second season to Yellowstone’s 1883 because Sheridan never intended for 1883 to have a second season. In Sheridan’s interview, he explained that while he had given the season’s scripts to the studio, Paramount’s Global President, Bob Bakish, didn’t fully comprehend the ending of the series as everyone literally dying, which was why the series was picked up for another season. Sheridan explained that the studio even wanted to have a meeting about how Sam Elliot’s character, Shea Brennan, had survived his suicide of a gunshot wound to the head in order to have a character to focus another season on.
Luckily, Sheridan was able to talk some sense into the studio, and no second season will be happening. While some fans might have been excited to see where else Sheridan can take the surviving characters of Yellowstone’s 1883, the series was already completed with a satisfying ending that doesn’t need to be extended. Instead of forcing a story that doesn’t need to be written, Sheridan can focus his time on other Yellowstone content, like 1923.
